John 14:15-17 – 5/30/2026
If you love me, [you will] keep my commandments.
John 14:15 (NRSVue)
The connection between loving Jesus and keeping Jesus’s commandments is central to the life of a Christian. Loving Jesus provides the motivation to follow; keeping the commandments is simply the act of following Jesus. There is a certain amount of tautology to the connection between loving Jesus and keeping his commandments. When asked what the greatest commandment was, Jesus answered that it is to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. If loving Jesus means keeping his commands, and his primary command is to love him, then in loving him we are already most of the way to keeping the commands. The greatest commandment has its second part, to love the neighbor in addition to God. Thus we can read the connection between loving Jesus and following his command as the connection between loving God and loving others.
All Christians believe there is a connection between loving God and following the command to love others, but there is some disagreement as to the exact nature of this relationship. Even the text of today’s reading, John 14, itself has different manuscript traditions with those traditions pointing to different ways of understanding the relationship between love and following commandments.
Some of the manuscript traditions have John 14:15 with a second clause in the imperative voice, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” This manuscript tradition is the Byzantine-type text that was used to translate the King James Version and is still used by the Eastern Orthodox Church. In this tradition, Jesus is giving his followers a command, an imperative. This is Jesus exhorting his disciples with motivation based on their love for him. In this tradition, it is not so much a theological point being made here. Rather Jesus makes yet another call to his disciples to live differently through and because of the love they have for the one they follow, God’s Son himself.
In the other major New Testament manuscript tradition, the Alexandrian-type text, the form of the sentence is different. The Alexandrian manuscripts are the ones used in modern critical translations like the NRSV. These manuscripts are considered, on the whole, more faithful to the original texts with fewer corruptions and interpolations. In this manuscript tradition, instead of the second clause of the sentence of verse 15 being an imperative, the second clause is in the future indicative, so it reads “If you love, you will keep my commandments.” Here instead of a call to obey, a call to love, Jesus is making a theological point. In this manuscript tradition, Jesus is claiming that loving him will produce obedience. Obedience, loving God and others, will flow with spontaneity from the very fact of loving Jesus. Here there is no need to repeat the command because the true follower of Jesus will, as a matter of course, be on the path to upholding that command.
These two divergent manuscript traditions do not contradict one another. Jesus can both exhort us to follow his commands out of love for us and tell us that obedience will flow with necessity from our love. Even though these two expressions are compatible, they emphasize the works of different actors. In the Byzantine-type text, the focus is on us, the followers of Jesus. We are the recipients of the meta-command to follow the commandments. It’s a reminder, an order, an invitation, and a further call to those who have already been called. In the Alexandrian-type text, instead of issuing another call, Jesus is telling his listeners what is already true. Once you have followed Jesus, you will love others; you will obey. The focus here is on the action of the Paraclete or Advocate named in the following verse. The Paraclete, usually identified with the Holy Spirit, produces obedience in the one who follows Jesus. Having heard the call to follow and love Jesus, the disciple is given the Holy Spirit who will produce love in obedience with the command to love. The focus is God’s action through the Holy Spirit. Obedience is not called for, it is assumed out of faith in the effectiveness of God’s given Advocate.
Even in the diversity of manuscripts with slightly different readings of key texts, there is something for the follower of Jesus to gain. Both traditions have it right. We are commanded to love, and love flows spontaneously from God’s presence in our lives. We are called to try to love, to try to follow the commandments to love, and at the same time, we are promised that we are given the ability and will to love such that we cannot help but do so. Taken in isolation, each of these two manuscript traditions have produced divergent theologies—A Western theology that follows the Alexandrian-type text and focuses on our inability without God, and God’s sovereignty over all including our very will—and an Eastern theology that follows the Byzantine-type textual tradition where there is a necessary synergy between God and humans, such that the command to obey and love bears repeating.
Both are correct. Love flows with necessary spontaneity AND we are commanded to love. Love is empowered by the Spirit AND we must choose to love even though we cannot love well on our own. Here there is a paradox even in our love and in our desire to love. There is a paradox and tension in our inability to love without God and the necessity that we choose to love with and through God. Scripture with disputed readings and textual traditions here highlights this tension, one we should inhabit and live in instead of explaining away.
Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.
Dionysus on a Bike 
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